The colour used to present steps is set in many different places, most of which have no other presentational function. Standard practice is to separate presentation from function.
The waterfall seems to not depend on the colour set for a step (relying only on CSS)
The statuslog is text only so colour is irrelevant (?)
The statusgui does seem to depend on the step's colour, but that could be set more simply based on the step's result
The debugclient seems to have no function that would involve colour.
If I have any of this wrong (wildly wrong?), pls let me know.
I have created the attached (diff -u) patch, which seems to work for both of the above clients that use colour and passes all of the tests.